Browser-only practice economics · no account
What do you have to charge to take home what you need?
Start from the monthly take-home you are aiming for. This works back through self-employment, federal and California tax and your practice costs to the collected fees that target requires — then shows the rate at every caseload, and the caseload at your rate.
Start from the take-home →The target
Say what you need to keep. The page finds the gross.
Take-home means after self-employment tax, federal income tax and California income tax, as a sole proprietor. Practice costs are everything the practice pays before you do — rent, EHR, liability insurance, supervision, licensing. Health insurance and retirement are deliberately not here; they are the next two decisions and the next two tools.
The same target at every caseload
What each caseload has to charge.
| Scheduled a week | Paid a week | Rate per paid session |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | — | — |
| 12 | — | — |
| 15 | — | — |
| 18 | — | — |
| 20 | — | — |
| 22 | — | — |
| 25 | — | — |
| 28 | — | — |
| 30 | — | — |
“Paid a week” applies your attendance figure. The highlighted row is the caseload you entered above. Every figure is recomputed from your inputs; none is stored or sent.
How it computes
One engine, run backward.
Take-home rises with every extra dollar of collected fees, so there is exactly one gross that produces your target. The page finds it by bisection — guess, test, halve the interval, sixty times — to the dollar, in your browser, on every keystroke.
Costs are entered monthly and annualized. They come off before any tax, which is why a dollar of real practice expense costs you less than a dollar: it is not taxed.
12.4% Social Security up to the 2026 wage base of $184,500 and 2.9% Medicare on all of it, plus the 0.9% additional Medicare tax above $200,000 ($250,000 married filing jointly). Half of it is deducted before income tax.
The standard deduction for your filing status and the §199A qualified business income deduction, which phases out between $201,750 and $276,750 of taxable income (single). Brackets and figures are from Revenue Procedure 2025-32.
The FTB had not published 2026 brackets at this build, so the page uses the 2025 rate schedule and standard deduction ($5,706 single) — the same choice, labeled the same way, as the tax pages on this site. California allows no qualified business income deduction. The 1% Mental Health Services tax applies above $1,000,000.
Paid sessions a year are scheduled sessions a week, times working weeks, times the attendance percentage you entered. The rate at your caseload and the caseload at your rate are the same division run each way. Neither is a recommendation; both are arithmetic.
Then what
The number this page gives you is the start of three other decisions.
Run it forward
The practice simulator
Put the rate and caseload this page produced into the full model with its twelve expense lines, and check the two directions agree.
Sole proprietor, or a corporation
The tax-strategy page
At the gross this page finds, whether an S corporation and a retirement plan change the answer — with the same constants.
Insurance versus private pay
Compare insurance with private pay
If the rate this page needs is above what a panel allows, that is the comparison to run next.
The cost side
Break-even by area
Where the monthly take-home target itself comes from: housing, loans and the rest, by California region.
Where every figure came from
Sources.
Federal
- IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 — 2026 rate schedules, standard deductions and the §199A phase-out thresholds
- Social Security Administration, contribution and benefit base — the 2026 wage base of $184,500
- IRS, self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare taxes) — the 92.35% factor, the 15.3% combined rate and the deduction for half of it
- IRS, questions and answers for the additional Medicare tax — the 0.9% rate and the $200,000 / $250,000 thresholds
California
The constants on this page are the ones therapist-tax-strategy-california and the practice simulator use, copied rather than restated, so the three pages agree to the dollar.
